Everything is monetized, even by the metric of saying something is invaluable means they are basing it off a perceived value. When you take actual money out of the equation the value just changes to the next paradigm. For example, favors and special treatment can earn priority for a service.
No and I don't think everything even can be. Things like honor, duty, and loyalty can't. You can buy an approximation of them that may work for some things but isn't the same.
How would you monetize a soldier sacrificing his life to save the lives of his comrades? At best you can attempt to compensate the family after the fact, but for a person unwilling to do it no dollar amount would entice them to do so; and a person willing to do it doesn't do so for money.
Beyond that I associate monetization with managerialism and refinement culture, and I think the MBAs run too much of the world already and don't want to give them the rest.
An interesting article -I had been thinking of the matter more as the pursuance of efficiency. Still maintaining the managerialism because you get a lot of spreadsheets of data with clueless employees making silly interpretations that are taken as truth by other clueless employees.
It's easy to see when playing an online team game. If there's an accepted most efficient strategy, you'll conjure a lot of negative responses by doing anything other than that strategy. The glorification of the "meta" as a holy path in gaming is tragic - it takes something fun and slowly turns it into a job.
I've been trying to to figure out if this efficiency focus is a cause of the scrub personality. I've already determined that most whales in p2w games are scrubs (and devs too often engage a disgusting cycle of monetization and manipulation with them). Scrub here meaning a person with low skill/ability who also has no incentive to improve, instead opting to seek out strategies developed by select authorities, blindly adhering to those strategies, and typically talking down to anyone that refuses to cooperate with their chosen strategy.
The corporate logo example, that's easily a symptom of managerialism; useless employees try their best to justify their salaries to other people trying to do the same.
There are probably more links between this cultural phenomenon and managerialism.
I've been trying to to figure out if this efficiency focus is a cause of the scrub personality. I've already determined that most whales in p2w games are scrubs (and devs too often engage a disgusting cycle of monetization and manipulation with them). Scrub here meaning a person with low skill/ability who also has no incentive to improve, instead opting to seek out strategies developed by select authorities, blindly adhering to those strategies, and typically talking down to anyone that refuses to cooperate with their chosen strategy.
One of us has the wrong definition of "scrub" then, because yours is the opposite of mine - I'd say a scrub is someone who knows they are using a suboptimal strategy, but shames their opponent for using a better strategy instead of taking an "If you can't beat them, join them" approach. The scrub would not pay to win in a p2w game, they would (rightly) complain about the unfair advantage their opponents get from decisions that should be out of scope.
I don't have many opportunities to talk about this, so forgive the lengthy post.
shames their opponent for using a better strategy
Aside from this, I'd say our definitions are not mutually exclusive. I haven't actually encountered your type of scrub (despite having spent hundreds of hours playing Destiny1 with random people), so it's hard to speak for the motivation they might be having. Surely they'd use an angle more effective than "stop winning so hard"? Like mimicking the argument I might make towards my type of scrub: accusing them of wanting to command a machine rather than play with real people. Or even complaining that using optimal strategy X is getting boring, so we should try something different. Though both types do seem to share that aspect; neither seems interested in actually cooperating with their allies (which always involves a degree of compromise and adaptation).
The scrub would not pay to win in a p2w game, they would (rightly) complain about the unfair advantage their opponents get from decisions that should be out of scope.
For this part, I assume you mean that they only complain and do not bother trying to compete or adapt. My type of scrub would also have a lack of adaptation and competitive attitude, but they deeply desire victory (this is different from wanting to compete) and understand that the optimal strategy is to spend more money.
A well-designed p2w game will have some avenue for free players to get close to competing with whales, leaving just enough power gap for the whales to stay ahead but not too much of a gap that good strategy can't beat the whale. This is necessary to keep the free players in the game and the free players are needed to help the lesser whales attain their beloved victories (this is part of why it's so rare to see a p2w game with no pvp; Genshin Impact is a bizarre case that I'm still trying to understand). No whale wants to play against only other whales - they'd have to make an effort to get their victory then, unless they knew that they had spent more than their opponent.
The whale-scrub likely has a complex about losing. They lack the right attitude to prosper in the face of adversity. They don't rise up and say "I'll win next time", they stay down and curse other people for their failures. This is what makes p2w such a paradise for them; now they can have a concrete hierarchy and force their way to the top - not through hard work, skill, or any of that gamer stuff, but through the utilization of non-game resources. It's a very 'revenge of the nerd' thing, to conquer the alpha male because you're willing to spend more money than he is on a game.
I don't mean to imply that any guy doing research on optimal strategies is a scrub. Full growth will inevitably involve seeing how other people succeed. The non-scrub will take those strategies and at least consider why they are so successful, then compare to their own strategies. A non-scrub cares about things beyond seeing a congratulatory message on their screen; they would want to know that they beat a strong adversary with their own skill, or they'd consider how they could improve when they fail, or any number of motivations. I'm wanting to place a fixation on victory because it seems to corrupt men who lack secondary motivations.
If a gamer looks up optimal strategies and only ever strictly adheres to those strategies without even considering why they're optimal and how they could be improved, I'd probably accuse them of being a scrub. Though consideration must be given to some possible excuses, like the odd case of just wanting to see how a story ends or the more p2w-model symptom of feeling like you're doing a chore by playing. It is also possible they're merely worshipping the authority of their favorite e-sports-guy, which is a seperate deficiency.
Coming back to the original point: "scrub" should probably only apply within multiplayer games and focus on the inability to engage with other players appropriately or effectively, spreading to a refusal to accept alternate strategies and a desire to ridicule anybody not agreeing with them. That would match both our definitions. A scrub would never be able to maintain a #1 position in a skill-based game because they can't adapt like a normal gamer. Scrubs that aren't dummies would learn to adopt successful strategies from non-scrubs, so the dumb and the desperate scrubs become the prime candidates for the whale role.
Surely they'd use an angle more effective than "stop winning so hard"?
Of course they would - they'd be angry at their opponent for exploiting a mechanic or tactic that in their view should not be part of the game. For example, if stunlocking your opponent is an effective strategy, they will be angry that the developers made such an anti-fun strategy so effective, and angry that their opponent is abusing that mechanic instead of playing the game "as intended."
Emulating the effective strategies used by other people is the opposite of being a scrub.
Ohh, that. Yeah, I have encountered a lot of that. Normally, they'd listen when I tried to explain how the meta worked, eventually understanding how to overcome their new problem. But only in pvp - in pve is ironically where I saw the most stubborn strategists unwilling to adapt or compromise. Maybe the time pressure makes people more willing to compromise?
I don't think there's another term for "bad player mimicks good players but refuses to improve their fundamentals". That's where the above always failed. If one particular strategy is seen as powerful, they'd get fed up and adopt it themselves after a while to "see how they like it" and it would 90% backfire because they don't understand the strategy well enough to back it up. Naturally, since they are then motivated by emotion, they are unwilling to listen to an explanation of why they're failing.
Low skill players can come to understand their limits and strategize around those limits. But a bad player cannot come to terms with their limits, ultimately stunting their skill growth. The most tragic player to play with in my experience is the bad player with moderate skill, who doesn't understand just how strong they could become, but has enough skill to carelessly mimick strategies they see, yet crumples when confronted with a high skill opponent.
Eh, I disagree. Making casual into that kind of an umbrella term dilutes the original meaning too much. A casual does not play for 6+ hours a day. A casual never cares to try adopt strategies for the purpose of efficiency.
The only time a casual would mimick a good player is to play around. They would then stop mimicking and revert to their normal play habits. If they stuck with the successful strategy, they would no longer be a casual.
Edit: I'd even say that a casual can be a good player (good players can lose). That would directly contradict the proposed definition. The casuals I encountered were decent teammates as long as I didn't expose them to high stress/skill roles.
Absolutely not. I think a lot of the problems we are facing today are because of the commodification of everything, even things which used to be sacred, like religion, history and culture. I've heard modern America be compared to a vast, continent sized shopping mall where people can wander in and peruse at their leisure, purchasing or passing things up with no connection to anything, or each other. After all, what does it mean to be an 'American' anymore? There is no binding social force other than meaningless consumption.
The USA was never meant to be culturally diverse. Racially (and perhaps one day even species) diverse, yes, but they're all expected to share one culture.
Oddly enough, this is baked right the fuck into Zootopia. There are NO CULTURAL DIFFERENCES between ANY of the species shown. They're all basically "American". Contrast this with Beastars, which at least touches on the fact that you're dealing with different creatures who could be expected to be coming from different cultural directions, but are being forced to figure out how to work alongside one another (and you can see how monstrous this expectation actually is.)
Very interesting question. I hope for interesting answers, but I will address some things that I think is not often talked about.
I think it is a major problem that everything, including people's attention, people's personal information, is now turned into a commodity to be bought and sold.
Reputation is a consumer good. Bill Gates will just buy reputation with his billions, as he has enough to feel no difference in his life. Politicians are bought and sold by Zuckerberg and Soros.
Capitalism has generated unprecedented wealth. There's more material prosperity than ever, but people lack meaning in life, which is why you see such pathologies as BLM and Antifa.
When I was a child, the idea of buying water in a store was considered silly. Then along came Perrier. And the environmental movement, telling everyone about how nasty the Great Lakes were. That's about when I remember bottled water starting to be a thing. (Outside of camping and other emergency/oddball situations, that is, of course.)
As far as monetization of oxygen goes .... ah, they're pushing space travel, and are planning on letting tourists go to the ISS now. Guess what one of the hotel charges will be. See: The original 1980s version of Total Recall (the remake was one of the stupidest things I've ever seen.)
It doesn't matter whether something "should" be. If it can be, it will be, and the majority of the sheeple will go along with it as long as their propagandized and conditioned properly beforehand. And for the most part, we're not even given a choice, we're just told to lump it and get used to it if we don't like it.
it's really asking if some things are so precious or valuable that they're technically "above value".
I started answering your title question, but it looks like you want this question instead.
My personal data is already monetized, I'm just not getting anything from it because it's being sold without my consent (non-negotiable e-contracts are not consent). I'd be fine with it if I got a cut or got to choose who it's sold to. I think I should also have the ability to withhold specific pieces of data from such sales if I choose. The why should be obvious; different people have different values, so I might consider it a big deal for Microsoft to know how many computers I own while the next guy might share his number of computers publicly without any sale needed.
You end up getting into "how much does anyone care about anything?" I hope you don't simply take "everyone has their price" at face value. It'd be a hard sell with any amount of money to try to buy the right to punch someone's baby in the face (let's assume the parent isn't a crack addict). Even if you could offer all the money in existence, the person should be suspicious as fuck and refuse while looking for hidden cameras. You'll get a different result if you try to buy the right for your own baby to do the punching because the parent will start making assumptions about how little damage is possible.
Is it really even controversial? I thought it was a common thought experiment to consider what your price is on various personal principles. I even went to the trouble of calculating my expected death time, estimating future expenditures and guessing at how much a compromise would diminish my quality of life to determine where my line is for several issues. (There are some I would sooner die than compromise on.)
Video games benefit from the cost being mostly front-loaded, so you can take full advantage of improved distribution to a larger market. If you run your own online store selling another copy of a $60 game is almost $60 of pure profit, minus a couple of bucks for payment processing and bandwidth.
the actual production effort that goes into a modern AAA game title is 100x or 1000x what it was back then
I dispute the premise. I'd agree if you said production budget or maybe minus the term "actual". It implies that no useless effort can come out of monetary incentive. Despite how nice the world would be if all systems utilized merit, the reality is not so. I blame managerialism.
satisfy the investors who aren't gamers themselves
I'd extend this past the simple financial investor. Take any AAA game product. The production leadership is responsible for crafting a solid creative vision of the finished state. They must then take efforts to ensure that every person working under them adheres to this vision, likely splitting up the vision by department to diminish directorial workload on each underling. Each of those underlings then will split up their portion amongst their underlings. Repeat until you get to code monkeys that are completely detached from the project because they have no idea what the creative vision is, so you have a thousand monkeys being expected to construct a forest by working on their little scrap of bark. There's just no skin in the game for any of them. Why should anyone care about the result as long as they get paid?
The complexity of the modern production team process is also a feature that grants immunity from outside criticism. In a team of 3 people, it's not hard to assign blame for mistakes as a consumer. In a team of 3000, it's a herculean task to figure out who to blame for any given mistake as a consumer. Uninformed consumers are more likely to make uninformed purchases, so it becomes a goal of the producer to minimize the information available to a consumer (or to present all relevant information in a manner that is not useful for informing a purchase). To do otherwise is to express confidence in the merit of your product, and we simply don't live in a world with such honest business.
Not to overlook the ideal demographic of people with low impulse control. Those are hugely profitable even outside of microtransactions. Combine with low information for guaranteed sales.
It's also nearly a fact that gamers don't have to be the audience of game producers anymore. The evidence has only become more obvious. Epic pays a big sum of cash for exclusivity based on projected sales (connection to reality not needed). Do people think that's new? Exclusivity deals have been around for a long time. Other deals can exist, like advertising some commercial product in your game. This is without getting into the extremely likely realm of contracts done under the table where special interest representative A pays a few million for their special interest to get pushed in the game somehow, but no one has publicly submitted a notarized confession so it's obviously impossible.
Are microtransactions making up for the gap?
No. No reason to trust any producer representative or journalist saying so. They''ve got a bucketfull of strategies to pursue to make up for the gap already. Microtransactions and seasonal dlc stuff is in the field of rent-seeking to me. The producers believe they deserve a big return on their financial investment. They followed the textbooks and powerpoint slideshows to the letter, so they are now entitled to your money. They're in the business of profits, not the business of making games.
Indies have a different set of problems, such as unironically taking a gamegrumps video as a lesson on game design. But at least indies tend to try to make their games be games instead of just quarterly earnings.
Everything is monetized, even by the metric of saying something is invaluable means they are basing it off a perceived value. When you take actual money out of the equation the value just changes to the next paradigm. For example, favors and special treatment can earn priority for a service.
Fiat currency was a mistake, we make imaginary value to things that are not backed by anything of actual value.
No and I don't think everything even can be. Things like honor, duty, and loyalty can't. You can buy an approximation of them that may work for some things but isn't the same.
How would you monetize a soldier sacrificing his life to save the lives of his comrades? At best you can attempt to compensate the family after the fact, but for a person unwilling to do it no dollar amount would entice them to do so; and a person willing to do it doesn't do so for money.
Beyond that I associate monetization with managerialism and refinement culture, and I think the MBAs run too much of the world already and don't want to give them the rest.
An interesting article -I had been thinking of the matter more as the pursuance of efficiency. Still maintaining the managerialism because you get a lot of spreadsheets of data with clueless employees making silly interpretations that are taken as truth by other clueless employees.
It's easy to see when playing an online team game. If there's an accepted most efficient strategy, you'll conjure a lot of negative responses by doing anything other than that strategy. The glorification of the "meta" as a holy path in gaming is tragic - it takes something fun and slowly turns it into a job.
I've been trying to to figure out if this efficiency focus is a cause of the scrub personality. I've already determined that most whales in p2w games are scrubs (and devs too often engage a disgusting cycle of monetization and manipulation with them). Scrub here meaning a person with low skill/ability who also has no incentive to improve, instead opting to seek out strategies developed by select authorities, blindly adhering to those strategies, and typically talking down to anyone that refuses to cooperate with their chosen strategy.
The corporate logo example, that's easily a symptom of managerialism; useless employees try their best to justify their salaries to other people trying to do the same.
There are probably more links between this cultural phenomenon and managerialism.
One of us has the wrong definition of "scrub" then, because yours is the opposite of mine - I'd say a scrub is someone who knows they are using a suboptimal strategy, but shames their opponent for using a better strategy instead of taking an "If you can't beat them, join them" approach. The scrub would not pay to win in a p2w game, they would (rightly) complain about the unfair advantage their opponents get from decisions that should be out of scope.
I don't have many opportunities to talk about this, so forgive the lengthy post.
Aside from this, I'd say our definitions are not mutually exclusive. I haven't actually encountered your type of scrub (despite having spent hundreds of hours playing Destiny1 with random people), so it's hard to speak for the motivation they might be having. Surely they'd use an angle more effective than "stop winning so hard"? Like mimicking the argument I might make towards my type of scrub: accusing them of wanting to command a machine rather than play with real people. Or even complaining that using optimal strategy X is getting boring, so we should try something different. Though both types do seem to share that aspect; neither seems interested in actually cooperating with their allies (which always involves a degree of compromise and adaptation).
For this part, I assume you mean that they only complain and do not bother trying to compete or adapt. My type of scrub would also have a lack of adaptation and competitive attitude, but they deeply desire victory (this is different from wanting to compete) and understand that the optimal strategy is to spend more money.
A well-designed p2w game will have some avenue for free players to get close to competing with whales, leaving just enough power gap for the whales to stay ahead but not too much of a gap that good strategy can't beat the whale. This is necessary to keep the free players in the game and the free players are needed to help the lesser whales attain their beloved victories (this is part of why it's so rare to see a p2w game with no pvp; Genshin Impact is a bizarre case that I'm still trying to understand). No whale wants to play against only other whales - they'd have to make an effort to get their victory then, unless they knew that they had spent more than their opponent.
The whale-scrub likely has a complex about losing. They lack the right attitude to prosper in the face of adversity. They don't rise up and say "I'll win next time", they stay down and curse other people for their failures. This is what makes p2w such a paradise for them; now they can have a concrete hierarchy and force their way to the top - not through hard work, skill, or any of that gamer stuff, but through the utilization of non-game resources. It's a very 'revenge of the nerd' thing, to conquer the alpha male because you're willing to spend more money than he is on a game.
I don't mean to imply that any guy doing research on optimal strategies is a scrub. Full growth will inevitably involve seeing how other people succeed. The non-scrub will take those strategies and at least consider why they are so successful, then compare to their own strategies. A non-scrub cares about things beyond seeing a congratulatory message on their screen; they would want to know that they beat a strong adversary with their own skill, or they'd consider how they could improve when they fail, or any number of motivations. I'm wanting to place a fixation on victory because it seems to corrupt men who lack secondary motivations.
If a gamer looks up optimal strategies and only ever strictly adheres to those strategies without even considering why they're optimal and how they could be improved, I'd probably accuse them of being a scrub. Though consideration must be given to some possible excuses, like the odd case of just wanting to see how a story ends or the more p2w-model symptom of feeling like you're doing a chore by playing. It is also possible they're merely worshipping the authority of their favorite e-sports-guy, which is a seperate deficiency.
Coming back to the original point: "scrub" should probably only apply within multiplayer games and focus on the inability to engage with other players appropriately or effectively, spreading to a refusal to accept alternate strategies and a desire to ridicule anybody not agreeing with them. That would match both our definitions. A scrub would never be able to maintain a #1 position in a skill-based game because they can't adapt like a normal gamer. Scrubs that aren't dummies would learn to adopt successful strategies from non-scrubs, so the dumb and the desperate scrubs become the prime candidates for the whale role.
Of course they would - they'd be angry at their opponent for exploiting a mechanic or tactic that in their view should not be part of the game. For example, if stunlocking your opponent is an effective strategy, they will be angry that the developers made such an anti-fun strategy so effective, and angry that their opponent is abusing that mechanic instead of playing the game "as intended."
Emulating the effective strategies used by other people is the opposite of being a scrub.
Ohh, that. Yeah, I have encountered a lot of that. Normally, they'd listen when I tried to explain how the meta worked, eventually understanding how to overcome their new problem. But only in pvp - in pve is ironically where I saw the most stubborn strategists unwilling to adapt or compromise. Maybe the time pressure makes people more willing to compromise?
I don't think there's another term for "bad player mimicks good players but refuses to improve their fundamentals". That's where the above always failed. If one particular strategy is seen as powerful, they'd get fed up and adopt it themselves after a while to "see how they like it" and it would 90% backfire because they don't understand the strategy well enough to back it up. Naturally, since they are then motivated by emotion, they are unwilling to listen to an explanation of why they're failing.
Low skill players can come to understand their limits and strategize around those limits. But a bad player cannot come to terms with their limits, ultimately stunting their skill growth. The most tragic player to play with in my experience is the bad player with moderate skill, who doesn't understand just how strong they could become, but has enough skill to carelessly mimick strategies they see, yet crumples when confronted with a high skill opponent.
"Casual."
Eh, I disagree. Making casual into that kind of an umbrella term dilutes the original meaning too much. A casual does not play for 6+ hours a day. A casual never cares to try adopt strategies for the purpose of efficiency.
The only time a casual would mimick a good player is to play around. They would then stop mimicking and revert to their normal play habits. If they stuck with the successful strategy, they would no longer be a casual.
Edit: I'd even say that a casual can be a good player (good players can lose). That would directly contradict the proposed definition. The casuals I encountered were decent teammates as long as I didn't expose them to high stress/skill roles.
Well, "everything has a price" created OnlyFans.
So, whatever prevents that.
Absolutely not. I think a lot of the problems we are facing today are because of the commodification of everything, even things which used to be sacred, like religion, history and culture. I've heard modern America be compared to a vast, continent sized shopping mall where people can wander in and peruse at their leisure, purchasing or passing things up with no connection to anything, or each other. After all, what does it mean to be an 'American' anymore? There is no binding social force other than meaningless consumption.
And without a binding social force, all that "diversity is our strength" completely shatters society.
The USA was never meant to be culturally diverse. Racially (and perhaps one day even species) diverse, yes, but they're all expected to share one culture.
Oddly enough, this is baked right the fuck into Zootopia. There are NO CULTURAL DIFFERENCES between ANY of the species shown. They're all basically "American". Contrast this with Beastars, which at least touches on the fact that you're dealing with different creatures who could be expected to be coming from different cultural directions, but are being forced to figure out how to work alongside one another (and you can see how monstrous this expectation actually is.)
Very interesting question. I hope for interesting answers, but I will address some things that I think is not often talked about.
I think it is a major problem that everything, including people's attention, people's personal information, is now turned into a commodity to be bought and sold.
Reputation is a consumer good. Bill Gates will just buy reputation with his billions, as he has enough to feel no difference in his life. Politicians are bought and sold by Zuckerberg and Soros.
Capitalism has generated unprecedented wealth. There's more material prosperity than ever, but people lack meaning in life, which is why you see such pathologies as BLM and Antifa.
“Let’s monetize oxygen”
When I was a child, the idea of buying water in a store was considered silly. Then along came Perrier. And the environmental movement, telling everyone about how nasty the Great Lakes were. That's about when I remember bottled water starting to be a thing. (Outside of camping and other emergency/oddball situations, that is, of course.)
As far as monetization of oxygen goes .... ah, they're pushing space travel, and are planning on letting tourists go to the ISS now. Guess what one of the hotel charges will be. See: The original 1980s version of Total Recall (the remake was one of the stupidest things I've ever seen.)
It doesn't matter whether something "should" be. If it can be, it will be, and the majority of the sheeple will go along with it as long as their propagandized and conditioned properly beforehand. And for the most part, we're not even given a choice, we're just told to lump it and get used to it if we don't like it.
Enter 1 Dogecoin(s) to read this response
I started answering your title question, but it looks like you want this question instead.
My personal data is already monetized, I'm just not getting anything from it because it's being sold without my consent (non-negotiable e-contracts are not consent). I'd be fine with it if I got a cut or got to choose who it's sold to. I think I should also have the ability to withhold specific pieces of data from such sales if I choose. The why should be obvious; different people have different values, so I might consider it a big deal for Microsoft to know how many computers I own while the next guy might share his number of computers publicly without any sale needed.
You end up getting into "how much does anyone care about anything?" I hope you don't simply take "everyone has their price" at face value. It'd be a hard sell with any amount of money to try to buy the right to punch someone's baby in the face (let's assume the parent isn't a crack addict). Even if you could offer all the money in existence, the person should be suspicious as fuck and refuse while looking for hidden cameras. You'll get a different result if you try to buy the right for your own baby to do the punching because the parent will start making assumptions about how little damage is possible.
Is it really even controversial? I thought it was a common thought experiment to consider what your price is on various personal principles. I even went to the trouble of calculating my expected death time, estimating future expenditures and guessing at how much a compromise would diminish my quality of life to determine where my line is for several issues. (There are some I would sooner die than compromise on.)
Video games benefit from the cost being mostly front-loaded, so you can take full advantage of improved distribution to a larger market. If you run your own online store selling another copy of a $60 game is almost $60 of pure profit, minus a couple of bucks for payment processing and bandwidth.
Oh..so you did want your title question answered.
I dispute the premise. I'd agree if you said production budget or maybe minus the term "actual". It implies that no useless effort can come out of monetary incentive. Despite how nice the world would be if all systems utilized merit, the reality is not so. I blame managerialism.
I'd extend this past the simple financial investor. Take any AAA game product. The production leadership is responsible for crafting a solid creative vision of the finished state. They must then take efforts to ensure that every person working under them adheres to this vision, likely splitting up the vision by department to diminish directorial workload on each underling. Each of those underlings then will split up their portion amongst their underlings. Repeat until you get to code monkeys that are completely detached from the project because they have no idea what the creative vision is, so you have a thousand monkeys being expected to construct a forest by working on their little scrap of bark. There's just no skin in the game for any of them. Why should anyone care about the result as long as they get paid?
The complexity of the modern production team process is also a feature that grants immunity from outside criticism. In a team of 3 people, it's not hard to assign blame for mistakes as a consumer. In a team of 3000, it's a herculean task to figure out who to blame for any given mistake as a consumer. Uninformed consumers are more likely to make uninformed purchases, so it becomes a goal of the producer to minimize the information available to a consumer (or to present all relevant information in a manner that is not useful for informing a purchase). To do otherwise is to express confidence in the merit of your product, and we simply don't live in a world with such honest business.
Not to overlook the ideal demographic of people with low impulse control. Those are hugely profitable even outside of microtransactions. Combine with low information for guaranteed sales.
It's also nearly a fact that gamers don't have to be the audience of game producers anymore. The evidence has only become more obvious. Epic pays a big sum of cash for exclusivity based on projected sales (connection to reality not needed). Do people think that's new? Exclusivity deals have been around for a long time. Other deals can exist, like advertising some commercial product in your game. This is without getting into the extremely likely realm of contracts done under the table where special interest representative A pays a few million for their special interest to get pushed in the game somehow, but no one has publicly submitted a notarized confession so it's obviously impossible.
No. No reason to trust any producer representative or journalist saying so. They''ve got a bucketfull of strategies to pursue to make up for the gap already. Microtransactions and seasonal dlc stuff is in the field of rent-seeking to me. The producers believe they deserve a big return on their financial investment. They followed the textbooks and powerpoint slideshows to the letter, so they are now entitled to your money. They're in the business of profits, not the business of making games.
Indies have a different set of problems, such as unironically taking a gamegrumps video as a lesson on game design. But at least indies tend to try to make their games be games instead of just quarterly earnings.
No. Prostitution should be illegal.